Julie Sedivy on Amplifying the Pleasure of Language

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . As a young linguistics professor, I once had a woman come up to me after the first lecture of a course I was teaching. She let me know she wouldn’t be continuing with the class. She was a poet, she said by way of explanation, and thus was put off by the overly analytical approach to language she had just witnessed. She told me was not interested in “dissecting” language. Since then, I have often encountered this attitude, as if a scientific way of thinking about language might choke off the source of creative inspiration. Perhaps it’s part of the greater sense that scientific and technological progress have led to a widespread disenchantment , as argued by the philosopher Max Weber, in which humans have lost access to nonrational modes of thought and to the emotions of awe and wonder that can well up in the face of mystery. I have to say it has not been this way for me. The deeper study of language has been nothing if not enchanting. Much about the structure of language and the mental processes that accompany it is submerged beneath conscious awareness; learning about these has often felt like being invited into the hidden rooms of a lover’s soul. Far from demystifying language, the layers of complexity that I’ve discovered have only led to greater mystery. And when I left the academy some years ago to turn my efforts to writing, I found that my scientific knowledge infused every aspect of my work, whether I was writing about language or anything else. Projecting oneself into the mind of a reader is a challenge for all writers. My work as a language scientist lends me a detailed model of the reader’s mind that I could not have acquired through intuition alone. Human attention and memory are shockingly constrained, and when parsing a sentence, readers are at constant risk of running up against the limits of how much information they can keep active in their minds. My awareness of […]

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